BOOKS

Australia's worst PM

Hal Colebatch

THE WHITLAM GOVERNMENT 1972-75 by Gough Whitlam Viking, f17.95 In these memoirs Australia's worst Prime Minister says little about the scan- dals and disasters that eventually brought his government down in comic-opera farce. But his portrait of himself is distinctive. There is an impression of something nasty on practically every page: not the witty, elegant nastiness of the Crossman Diaries, but a clumsy, heavy, perhaps unconscious nastiness. Even the dedication to his wife, `my best appointment', perhaps an in- tended compliment, achieves only elephantine pomposity. Whitlam's gnaw- ing hatred of Sir John Kerr, the governor- general who called the 1975 election which Whitlam lost by the greatest landslide in Australian history (here usually referred to simply as 'Kerr',) becomes almost pitiful. He goes out of his way to insult John Stone, the former head of the treasury, the `pusillanimous' British, and most other Australian politicians.

Among these is his predecessor as ALP leader, the decent old fogey Arthur Cal- well (who 'delighted' in being allowed to speak in support of American bombing in South Vietnam), but there is so much resentment, grievance and curiously lugub- rious malice infusing the book that it is hard to be sure how these various enemies and inferiors rank. How shrewd the Eco- nomist was when it observed in 1977, 'Whitlam is the classic conspiratorial school bully.' This is a sample, listed in the index not under 'Hawke' but under 'fleas':

Fraser, whose natural taste was country and western, converted the music room [of the Prime Minister's official residence] into a spare toilet. It is impossible to satisfy some people at the Lodge . . . Bob and Hazel Hawke spent their first night there as our guests. We put them up in the nuptial suite formerly occupied by the McMahons. They later complained about the fleas which bit them whr.n they were disporting themselves on the carpet.

Towards the late Australian traitor Wil- fred Burchett he was benign, making the restoration of Burchett's passport one of his first actions in office. Burchett, he explains here, was, 'an Australian journal- ist . . . who had covered the civil wars in Korea and Vietnam from the northern sides'. He does not mention that Burchett's passport had been refused because of well-documented evidence from survivors that his coverage of the Korean war had included assisting in the interrogation of Australian and Allied prisoners of war in Chinese prison camps, sometimes while wearing Chinese army uniform.

Months after the fall of Saigon Whitlam told Parliament 'the change-over has been peaceful and effective', and now writing ten years and thousands of refugee-boats later, he still refers to the North Viet- namese conquest as 'liberation'. Actually a bi-partisan Senate committee report con- cluded that the Whitlam Government had deliberately delayed the evacuation of Australian-associated and other anti- communist Vietnamese from Saigon in order to minimise the number of refugees'. We know from the memoirs of his former immigration minister, Clyde Cameron, Whitlam's attitude to what he called 'fuck- ing Vietnamese Balts with their political and religious hatreds against us.' The British connection and particularly British honours (perhaps, in his mind, incarnated in Sir John Kerr) are near the very top of Whitlam's long list of hatreds. There is page after page about them.

As Australian political scientist John Paul has pointed out,

He reveals a detailed knowledge of the subject which is all the more surprising in one whose purpose during his triennium of misrule was to delight in denying such honours to others . . . It is now clear that Australia's only distinctive order, the Order of Australia, is a slavish copy of the Order of Canada, even down to the lacklustre com- monplace title . . . Gough Whitlam went to a great deal of trouble plagiarising the Order of Canada and as a result knowingly foisted on the Australian public a system of awards sub-standard by design.

The use of 'God Save the Queen' as the Australian national anthem also roused Whitlam's ire. He started the process of replacing it with the inane 'Advance Au- stralia Fair', whose infantile lyrics begin:

Australians let us all rejoice, for we are young and free, We've golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea.

When the award of the Order of Australia to Whitlam himself was announced in 1978 he was in Warsaw. The first people to hail him as 'Companion' were the communist party officials of Poland, themselves repre- sentatives of a seedy travesty of national- ism, a point whose irony seems to escape him, since he recounts the incident with evident pride.

Next to resentment, Whitlam seems interested in fantasies of grandeur: when the Australian ambassador to Turkey was also appointed to the Vatican, Whitlam recalls, 'I endorsed the papers "Let McMil- lan have the Sublime Porte and the Holy See".' He denies as a fabrication that he ordered his portrait to be hung in every government office in place of that of the queen, so presumably the portraits of him I and others saw in government offices in 1975 were an independent gesture of hom- age to him, if not an hallucination gener- ated by the mere presence of so much would-be greatness.

He heads the first chapter of this book with a quotation from the 1972 election which installed his government that implies much about his vision and values: The second day of December is a memorable day. It is the anniversary of Austerlitz. Far be it from me to wish . . . to assume the mantle of Napoleon; but I cannot forget that 2 December was a date on which a crushing

defeat was administered to a coalition, another ramshackle, reactionary coalition.

As Dr Paul noted, years previously Whit- lam spoke of 'the grandest military title in the world — Marshal of France.'

It is not given to one man to do everything wrong, and his policy of good relations with Indonesia was uncharacteris- tically sensible (the Hawke government has largely rectified this anomaly). He does himself less than justice in his perfunctory treatment of another good move: a 25 per cent tariff cut. This gets only six of 743 pages of text, perhaps because it was unpopular with some unions, but more, one feels, because Whitlam was much less interested in such matters than in postur- ings. It was not enough to offset the inflation, unemployment and social decay his regime ushered in. Harold Wilson, to whom he has many unfortunate resembl- ances, at least began with a weak economy. The man who was Prime Minister of Australia for three disastrous years seems here to have the outlook of a petulant adolescent whose fantasies have been de- nied. His 1975 battle-cry, 'Maintain Your Rage!' was a not untypical attempt to institutionalise hatred and vindictiveness in Australian politics. But by that time the electorate had recognised him for what he was. One ends this apologia wondering what Australia escaped in 1975 and with feelings of gratitude to Sir John Kerr.

Australia, now an economic shambles (its dollar has gone from 65p to 40p in a year, against a weak pound, and its foreign debt is of Latin American magnitude,) has not been well-served in Prime Ministers since Whitlam. Neither Fraser nor Hawke proved capable of undoing the economic and social havoc Whitlam began. But at least we may hope that we shall not look upon his like again.